Does an ad selection system based on tagging provide a way to realize John Battelle’s idea of sell-side advertising? The notion of sell-side advertising has been around for a couple years but has failed to achieve a really successful implementation in the marketplace, to my knowledge. Part of the problem, I think the system could end up being too much work for publishers unless proper care is taken.

Instead of advertisers buying either PPC networks or specific publishers/sites, they simply release their ads to the net, perhaps on specified servers where they can easily be found, or on their own sites, and/or through seed buys on one or two exemplar sites. These ads are tagged with information supplied by the advertiser, for example, who they are attempting to reach, what kind of environments they want to be in (and environments they expressly forbid, like porn sites or affiliate sites), and how much money they are willing to spend on the ad…

Once the ads are let loose, here’s the cool catch - ANYONE who sees those ads can cut and paste them, just like a link, into their own sites (providing their sites conform to the guidelines the ad explicates in its tags).

To achieve wide scale success, it ought to be as easy to grab ads for your blog as it is to tag a site in del.icio.us. In fact, a del.icio.us based implementation seems quite doable. I ought to be able to be able to click on an advertising link, tag the landing page as “advertisement”, and have the advertisement automatically published to my site, with me getting credit for clickthroughs. The tags of others can help me to find additional relevant advertisements for my site.

You can imagine further simplifying things for publishers through an automated ad recommendation system- choosing ads based on the idea”People who published this ad also published these other ads.”